The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
(with Ministerial Aspirant Deanna Vandiver)
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, January 18, 2009
I’m grateful to Ministerial Aspirant Deanna Vandiver for agreeing to share this sermon with me, as together we wrestle with a difficult topic – being white. This is a bit of a turn-around for Martin Luther King Sunday, since most years, UU ministers take this opportunity to preach on race and racism and prejudice and discrimination, in order to promote equality and justice. We’re going in a slightly different direction this time, but with the same goal. We still want to promote equality and justice, and we think that a good way for that to happen – and it might well be the only way it can happen – is if we white people think about, talk about, and truly deal with, our whiteness. I’ve asked Deanna to join me in sharing with you our answers to 5 questions:
When did you know you were white? And how did you find out?
What that mean to you when you first found out?
What does being white mean to you now? and
How does being white affect your efforts to be anti-racist?
We’ll be sharing this sermon as we share this journey. It’s our hope that together we will all be inspired and empowered to continue our efforts in the joyful, hard, sacred work of anti-oppression, to build the world of equity and justice that Martin Luther King, and all of us, dream of. (And please join Jyaphia Christos-Rodgers and me as we lead a session at 2 pm of the UUA curriculum of that same name.)
In 1960, when I was 8 years old, my father, a union organizer, was tapped by New Orleans Mayor Chep Morrison to serve as the labor representative on a committee to oversee the desegregation of the public schools. As a result of that work, I remember watching on TV as a little black girl walk to school through a crowd of screaming whites. Later I learned her name was Ruby Bridges and that the school was Franz School in my father’s old neighborhood in the 9th Ward. I didn’t know I was white before then – before then, I was just a girl. But watching television with my parents that week, I knew that what was happening to her could not, would not, ever happen to me, even though we lived in the same city and were close to the same age. She was black, I was white.
The trouble was, the people screaming and throwing things at her were white too. I felt a lot of things about that, and I was too young to process all I was feeling. White people were mean and scary, and I didn’t want to be like them. But then, my father and mother were white, and they supported and worked for civil rights, and wouldn’t let anyone use bad words for black people around them. I did want to be like them. I guess I learned that there were two kinds of white people, bad ones and good ones, and I wanted to do everything I could to always be one of the good ones.
[Deanna’s Sharing]
I really don't remember the first time I knew I was White. Which I guess says a lot about the privilege that comes with Whiteness. The first time I really remember paying attention to my skin color and what it meant was in middle school, a public school in rural Georgia. One day I looked up and realized that Raymond, John G., John-John, Tyrone, Terrance – goodness, most all the Black boys from my childhood were no longer in class with me. We were tracked pretty aggressively by perceived academic skills in our middle school classes and suddenly there was only one African-American boy in any of my academic classes -- and he had transferred in from Athens, from a more advanced school.
Looking around the classroom, I had to wonder – were the White boys really that much smarter than the Black boys? I didn't remember that being the case in elementary school. Come to think of it, all my teachers were white now too, another strange and strangely ominous change from elementary school...
[Melanie's Sharing]
There’s several problems with thinking there are only two kinds of white people, the good ones and the bad ones. Since it was hard to tell right off what kind of white person I was dealing with, and since growing up I had had some pretty bad experiences with white people over racial issues, I found it hard to trust white people. So race became a topic that I either thrust in other white people’s faces, so that casual interactions became fraught with danger, or that I avoided altogether, in order to have any white friends at all. In addition, since I admired my parents and other white civil rights activists so much, I decided that being an unprejudiced white person (which was what I thought we were) was pretty cool. I developed a sense of pride about my whiteness, because I was one of the good guys. Over time, I began to feel a subtle, subconscious sense of superiority that was a kind of double-whammy: since I thought that black people needed my help, I felt somehow “over” them, while at the same time, I also felt “over” other, racist, whites as well.
It’s hard for me, even painful, to think back about that time, which lasted for close to two decades; to think about what undiscovered slights, hurts, and gaffes I committed while blithely thinking of myself and whites like me as saviors of black people and people of color in general, with my smug sense of being better than “less enlightened” whites, my supercilious know-it-all attitude. I look back at my earlier self, and I cringe a little.
[Deanna’s Sharing]
I remember being really puzzled – and suddenly feeling really uncomfortable with the Black girls in my class. There were a few Black girls -- fewer and fewer in each passing grade, but many more than the Black boys.
Why uncomfortable you might ask? I didn't know at the time. I just remember feeling really embarrassed – as if something was really, really wrong and unfair, but in a vague and unnameable sort of way. I felt a layer of guilt and culpability without understanding its source -- and it felt icky.
I had had a pretty overdeveloped sense of justice for years -- my dad talks about me chanting "ERA, ERA" before I was even 5 years old -- but usually I could stand cleanly on the side of those being wronged without feeling like I was a part of the wronging, if you will. Or in today's language, I could usually side with the oppressed without
feeling implicated in the oppressing. I didn't feel clean this time.
While I didn't have the language of oppression in middle school, I certainly had the sticky feelings that went with it. And this time I had no idea what to do about it. Usually I would talk to a teacher when I was confused, but something held me back. Maybe it was that I sensed that all these white teachers were somehow tangled up in the stickiness too?
[Melanie's Sharing]
This is not to say that during the period between the 1960s and the 1980s that I was a complete and utter jerk – I worked in local and national politics, including in Dutch Morial’s campaign to be the first black mayor of New Orleans, and on issues of justice and equality, especially on access to health care, and on environmental issues that impacted low income neighborhoods. I had both white and black friends and belonged to a community of progressives that was both challenging and nurturing. But I was still walking around with an inner sense of superiority that was based on my being “a good white person.”
In fact, it was a dear friend from the early days of the Morial campaign who brought me to the revelation that changed my life and my attitude about racism and whiteness. In the late 1980s, as part of my preparation for Unitarian Universalist ministry, I attended an “Undoing Racism” workshop facilitated by the People’s Institute for Survival & Beyond. One of the leaders was Ron Chisom, who by that time I had known for about ten years.
I was glad to be in the workshop, since frankly, I thought I could be useful to Ron and the other workshop leaders. Because, you know, I didn’t need the workshop. Other whites needed the workshop, for sure, but not me. I like to say that I had a callous on my shoulder from patting my own self on the back.
Finding out that I benefited from racism, that I enjoyed something called “white privilege,” that the goals of integration, which my parents and others had fought so hard for, were paltry and inherently unequal, and even racist in assumptions – like, for example, only the "best" black people deserved to be integrated – these were all giant blows to my white ego. My humanity was being circumscribed and compromised, and I had never even known it. To say I was deflated is not nearly enough. It was indeed a revelation. The dichotomy I had set up and lived my life by didn’t matter as much as I had thought.
Since that intense two-day workshop more than twenty years ago, I have been on a journey – an exodus out of a kind of slavery based in feelings of superiority and the benefits of unearned privilege, and into an in-between place, not where I was, but not where I long to be. It’s not the Promised Land, for sure, but I’d rather be here than where I was before.
[Deanna’s Sharing]
I once joked that sometimes I forgot I was a White woman. Now I never forget. And I don't want to. I want to remember that I move in this world as a complex creature among many complex creatures and that I need to pay attention always to my assumptions. It isn't comfortable, no. But it becomes more and more so as I try to stretch past my areas of comfort into right relationship with everyone in my community.
I asked a dear friend of mine, a White woman who grew up in Iowa and whom I met at college in Minnesota, when she first became aware of her Whiteness. There was silence for a while and then she said "When I moved to Minnesota." I confess, her answer floored me a bit. And then it crystallized a concept for me. If White is all you know, then you really don't necessarily know that you're White. Don't ask a fish about water, right? And who thinks about air until you cannot breathe?
In 2004, I moved out of Uptown and into a neighborhood on the edge of the Treme, Tulane/Galvez, and Mid-City neighborhoods. Part of it was economics - I was looking to buy a house that cost less than $100,000. But part of it was a deliberate choice to live in an integrated neighborhood. After living in integrated neighborhoods in the Twin Cities and Washington, DC, and after four months in Nicaragua, I realized that I did not like living with only White people. Not because White people are inherently bad -- more because I want to be aware of my Whiteness - to deal with it -- and living in a monochromatic community allowed me to forget about air and water and justice on a daily basis.
I have learned that this White person's task with regard to developing a healthy White identity, requires the abandonment of individual racism as well as the recognition of and active opposition to institutional and cultural racism. The individual part I have been consciously working on for years. In the language of anti-racist training, I had begun to "unpack the backpack of white privilege and of my own internalized assumptions."
I carry within me and on my surface a knot of interlocking oppressions and identities- I am White, Woman, Heterosexual, Unitarian Universalist, New Orleanian, Partnered, first-born child -- and every bit of that impacts how I act in this world, how I am received by this world, and how I am in relationship with those I meet. As I strive to become Anti-racist, as I hold all my internal assumptions and unconscious beliefs up to the light of love and justice, I am also called to act in the world.
Institutional and cultural racism are pervasive and often invisible. As they become visible to me, I can no longer stay in the sticky, icky, uncomfortable stage. Now I have to speak up, speak out, reach out. Hatred, bigotry, and indifference harm the humanity of the oppressors as well as the humanity of the oppressed. And I want to be a healthy human, in right relationship with all the other humans around me. So I'm White and I struggle to be an Anti-Racist Ally all the time -- not just when it is convenient or safe.
That's how I'm dealing with my whiteness. Some days are better than others. But each day that I stand on the side of love and justice is a day well lived for this White woman.
[Melanie's Sharing]
If talking about race is hard, talking about being white is extrahard. We whites would much rather talk about how racism has damaged or hurt people of color than ever speak about how racism has benefited us. Or on hearing how racism has harmed people of color, we whites often want to “change the channel” to talk about how we’ve been hurt too, how some police officer has unfairly hassled us that one time, or how – since we were one of the good white people – racist whites have been on our case too. It’s exceedingly hard to for us whites to talk about how race has been set up in our country to benefit us, and has worked really really well.
Learning to be anti-racist requires almost constant vigilance, since it seems sometimes as though everything is conspiring to make me forget, make me not see, force me back into my nice padded and upholstered prison of privilege. I look for organizations doing work in the community with whom I can work and to whom I can offer what skills I have. Striving to be in right relationship with my white brothers and sisters, I feel compassion for where ALL of us, not just some of us, have been placed by racism. Striving to be a true ally to people of color, I look for ways to use my position to push things forward; I try to keep my perspective, my focus, as if being an anti-racist were a kind of lens that I need to wear in order to truly SEE.
In the same way that I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t see me as a person with gray hair and blue eyes, as a woman, as a New Orleanian, as a Unitarian Universalist, as a minister, as the first-born child of my parents, I don’t want to live in a world where race doesn’t matter. I want to live in a world where all our glorious and prickly differences do matter, but don’t cause harm. Step by step, inch by inch, I want to help us all get to that world.
So may that day come, and soon. AMEN -- ASHÉ -- SHALOM -- SALAAM -- NAMASTE -- BLESSED BE!
